Wroclaw’s Electric Carsharing Program Passes 30,000 Users

A local news report in the Polish city where I’ve been living for nearly 10 years highlights that our relatively fresh electric carsharing program — Vozilla — has passed 30,000 users after approximately a year of service. Before moving to Florida a month ago, I was seeing the cars — mostly Nissan LEAFs — everywhere I went. I would say anytime I went out beyond our corner shops (and often there as well), I saw at least one of these fun-colored LEAFs.

Wroclaw, Poland, is a city of about one million if you count all the students and foreigners (it has a ton of the former and, for a Polish city, quite a lot of the latter). There are 180 LEAFs in the carsharing program and 20 Nissan e-NV200 electric vans, last I heard. If you look at electric carsharing programs globally, that’s surely a rather large program relative to the population — that’s even a fairly large program in absolute terms.

As you can expect, the program is easy to use. You get an app, find a car near you, go over to it, unlock it, and it’s yours till you’re done. The company managing the program makes sure the cars are charged each night to try to help drivers not have to worry about that.

As far as pricing, it’s just 1 złoty (~27¢ USD) per minute of driving and 10 groszy (3¢ USD) per minute parked. That’s the same pricing for the LEAF or the e-NV200.

Just before leaving Poland, I met a Vozilla user in a coffee shop and decided to interview him about the program, his experiences so far, and broader context regarding his transportation habits. Check it out:

The 30,000 Vozilla users mentioned at the top have reportedly “rented” the cars 150,000 times and driven more than 1 million kilometers. Well, they had done so as of that report on June 6, 2018. The numbers are all presumably much higher now. Here are a few more stats from that article, translated via Google: “The company presented statistics for the first half of the year. It follows from them that cars are rented on average 729 times a day. Most often between 15-18 hours, that is during the afternoon peak, and the average length of rental is 16 minutes.

“… The operator boasts that on the weekend of 14-15 April cars were rented 2780 times and they were transported at that time 25 thousand km.”

We’ll have much more about Vozilla in coming weeks from Jacek Fior, as well as an insight into far more e-mobility leadership in Vozilla’s home city.